As you may recall I posted links to all of the primary literature many times back in the day (and you generally confirmed what I posted), but the antivaxxers simply ignored it. Knight Shift is generally a good guy but he has it in for Pharma when it comes to some vaccines and statins, but apparently not for oncology treatments.
One point that really needs to be amplified here is the impact of the evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. By July 2021, vaccine deployment, combined with public health interventions (distancing, masking, etc.) had brought infection rates down to about 10,000 cases/day (from 250K/day, clearly demonstrating that the vaccines greatly reduced transmissions.
What happened next was the delta and then omicron variants boomed and they're 3-5X more infectious than the original strain, making prevention of transmission far more difficult, even for those vaccinated (given that the humoral immune response activated by vaccines generally wasn't fast enough to prevent infection from these variants, unlike the original strain), leading to 800-900K cases/day during the worst of the omicron wave.
The other thing most don't get is that we were extraordinarily fortunate to have the vaccines rolled out by spring 2021, before the highly infectious variants hit. We had ~600K deaths by April 2021 with about 20% of the population having been infected and omicron eventually reached about 95% penetration of the population - and without vaccines, that would have led to almost 5X as many deaths as we saw through April 2021, i.e., we would have likely had 3MM deaths by April 2022 instead of the 1MM deaths we had, meaning the vaccines roughly saved 2MM lives.
Lastly, it's fascinating that these COVID posts have been allowed. That will likely end with this post, since my posting on COVID seems to drive some crazy leading to locked/deleted threads, but figured why not try to educate a few folks.
This is going to be my last post on this. As usual you are gentlemanly in your posts, as opposed to UMRU, who comes across as haughty. Maybe he/she is not this way. If you think you have some sort of superior position, share your papersand stop playing little games, implying that you are smarter than everyone else. One does have to be an immunologist to read and interpret data from scientific and medical literature. That's pretty much what I do on a daily basis, and I have plenty of experience in watching scientists and corporation present and skew data to prove their biased case or point of view.
First, I am not an antivax or anti pharma, and I don't care to be lumped in with many of the antivax nutjobs on these boards. But this is the nature of (anti) social media. I'm fine with vaccines generally, and statins is a different story. My basic problem with statins is that IMO, they are grossly overprescribed and many doctors are either too lazy and/or too quick to write a script without looking at all of the data. Many doctors will simply write a script on the basis of total cholesterol, without considering additional (and perhaps more meaningful factors such as triglycerides, A1C, insulin resistance, HDL, apoB, counseling/questioning patients on their diet and lifestyle, etc. There is some excellent work being done now by groups of doctors and scientists on what are called "lean mass hyperesponders" that MAY show that not all people with high cholesteroal will develop ACSVD. The response from some statin true believers is to call these people "deniers," "conspiracy theorists, etc, etc. How did science and medicine evolve to this?
This microthread within the thread started with my post about several things that were never proven as correct. As usual, context and words matter.
"Vax
prevents spread.
Deny natural immunity"
Focus on
prevent. This has never been proven, and probably never will be proven. Prevent means to keep (stop) from happening. Reduce the spread? I would agree with that. The problem is the messaging from the President and the former CDC Director repeatedly made misstatements, such as: “Data have emerged again that [demonstrate] that even if you were to get infected during post vaccination that you can’t give it to anyone else,” (see link below, posted by the bastion of right wing conspiracy theories, CNN!!). Also, Dr. Fauci was also very inarticulate in many interviews and public statements.
The problem with such statements is that for many people who don't have the time, desire or capability to fact check and/or read scientific literature is that they take such statements as gospel, and then, they use these statements to gaslight others that they have the superior position. Those on one side will question those who question the CDC director, when she was clearly wrong. Those on the other side will use such missttatements to draw broader conclusions that "the vaccines don't work," which is clearly not the case as you have pointed out, and I have NEVER denied. Of course they worked in greatly reducing severe symptoms and death in the immunocomprised, obese and diabetic people.
As far as "deny natural immunity," perhaps "deny" was too strong of a word, but Walensky and others continually downplayed and/or disregarded natural or acquired immunity from being previously infected. Have said this many times before, messaging matters. And when messaging from high government officials and politicians (the President) is muddled or worse yet, dogmatic, bad outcomes ensue. In particular, one tribe will adhere to these statements as absolute truth and use them as a cudgel to label people who question the statements as deniers, conspiracy theorists or worse. On the other hand, the other tribe will take any innaccuracy by these officials and politicians and use them to gaslight these people. For the average person who does not dig in and read the literature or consider accurate fact checks, they can be easily misled. Then it spread to a social media war of words where nobody wins.
Finally, one quibble with what you posted above: "Vaccine deployment,
combined with public health interventions (distancing, masking, etc.) had brought infection rates down to about 10,000 cases/day (from 250K/day,
clearly demonstrating that the vaccines greatly reduced transmissions."
IMO, you have an internal inconsistency in your statement, and you left out herd/natural/acquired immunity as well as lockdowns, closing schools/offices, etc. With these confounding variables, I don't think anyone can definitively say "vaccines greatly reduced transmissions." They probably helped, but the the other factors may have contributed equally or more.
CNN link:
economics.princeton.edu
www.britannica.com
encyclopediaofalabama.org
en.wikipedia.org
